“I … feel encompassed with chains when I write, which check me in my happiest flights, and force me continually to reflect, not, whether this is just? but, whether this is safe?” confessed Hannah Cowley in the preface to her 1786 comedy, A School for Greybeards. The chains of literary propriety, she explained further, constrained the free movement of a woman playwright's creativity far more narrowly than it was experienced by male playwrights, or novelists of either sex. Despite these professed difficulties, Cowley was one of the most successful dramatists of the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, when she drew the curtains on the stage in 1795 with her last play The Town Before You, it was again on a very bitter note. The audience, she complained, preferred the slapstick “tumble from a chair,” to the “genius or intellect” of a carefully crafted dialogue. “From a Stage, in such a state, it is time to withdraw,” she concluded in the preface to The Town. At the same time, by the very act of presenting these arguments to the readers of her plays, Cowley seems to suggest that they, in contrast to playgoers, constituted a more discerning audience: that they could be confided in and relied on to judge the play's true merit. Reading rather than staging was to do justice to the playwright's talent.

When Cowley was quitting the dramatic arena with her last comedy, another woman writer, Joanna Baillie, was preparing to enter it, also with an extended prefatory discourse aimed at the reading public. Interestingly, while Cowley only published her plays after they had been performed, Baillie, by publishing Plays on the Passions in 1798 reversed the order of the first encounter between audience, author, and plays. She must have judged that in this case the textual intercourse, that is, the reader's engagement with the plays guided by the authorial prefaces needed to precede actual performance.

The paper explores the complex reasons for and effects of such prefatory strategies women playwrights employed to attain public recognition and commercial success at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.